STREAM your mind!

I have worked with live broadcastings or as I call them net streaming happenings since 1998. Cameras and live net streaming techniques had become more available, so basically it was about bringing together creative people in different virtual or physical places, playing together and streaming the live video input over to net to everyone. For example, I live dupped the iconic Finnish movie The Unknowns Soldier in one of the happenings. The basic communication around the globe was done via IRC.
See some documentations at John Hopkins website of Neoscenes Occupation 1 and Occupation 2.

In 2001, when I started my MA studies in Medialab, I initiated and organised the biggest streaming happening ever in Finland: EXPAND. Expand happened in Meteori Cafe in Helsinki which was a collection point of streams coming from various artists and performers around the world. There were several musicians and video artists performing also physically in Meteori.
See also some documentation of Expand at John Hopkins’ website.
And a nostalgic Expand Network site.

After Expand, many other streaming happening kicked off. We participated with Aleksi Nuuja and Mika Meskanen to Fusion ‘01 – Translocal Streaming Party presenting the Finnish time zone in Sydney, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Weimar (June 2001). I worked with Mika and Aleksi also in VideA Festival in Barcelona (October 2001). Me and Mika took care of creating the videos and Aleksi composed the music. The festival didn’t have very good Internet access, but we were still able to connect the festival to Rovaniemi with 56kb modem and PingFM server in Germany. Ceniq band from Rovaniemi was heard live in Barcelona while we were doing live visual mixing.

Di-Fusion was a 24 hour live and on-line open platform happening organised in Colorado (April 2002). We contributed the happening live stream with Jodi Rose’s singing bridges, O Samuli A’s and Aleksi Nuuja’s music from Katastro.fi headquarters in Helsinki. I collaborated with Jodi Rose’s Singing Bridges project for the first time in this happening called Shadow Party.

In May 2002, Kiasma invited Mika Meskanen and me to organise a workshop about live streaming. This was part of Kiasma’s Urb project and we had a very nice workshop with youngsters in Vesala Art Corner in Helsinki that after learning the basic techniques and creating content ended to a streaming happening.

After that, there have been some smaller scale streaming experiments such as trying to live broadcast my Lappish drumming from a forest to US via mobile phone. At that time, the mobile phones weren’t as evolved as they are today…